AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
* Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...
“How long have you been v*g*n?”
This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers.
But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...
Summary
Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step.
The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...
Today is India's 76th Independence Day! I thought it would be nice to look at some of India's progress over the last three-fourths of a century:
Infant mortality has gone down by 13.48% since 1960.
The death rate from malaria has gone down from 15.78 deaths per 100,000 people in 1990 to 2.61 deaths per 100,000 in 2019.
The number of children whose development has been stunted (as a consequence of poor nutrition or repeated infections) has gone down from 66.04 million in 1990 to 49.26 million, a ~25% reduction.
The share of Indians living in extreme poverty has drastically reduced from 58.96% in 1981 to 10.55% in 2017.
We still have a long, long way to go in many domains (as one EA-aligned example, lead in paint and lead concentration in children is still a huge issue in India).
Source: Our World in Data